May this wild rainforest be Patagonia’s best-kept secret?

I’ve by no means been a lover of mountain climbing within the rain. But standing in Chile’s Queulat National Park, soaked to the pores and skin and ankle-deep in mud, I discover myself mesmerised by it. Mist drifts between large beech and cinnamon timber, water droplets cling to moss-covered bark like scattered diamonds, and on the forest flooring, caterpillars shelter beneath nalca (Chilean rhubarb) vegetation with leaves the dimensions of elephants’ ears.

This is Patagonia, however not as I’d anticipated it. The huge panorama spanning southern Chile and Argentina is best recognized for its dry steppe and stark granite peaks. Yet in Chile’s Aysén area, the place rain falls a lot of the yr, the Valdivian temperate rainforest blankets a lot of the space, incomes it the nickname Patagonia Verde.

“I find it strange when it’s sunny,” my driver Juan had mentioned earlier that morning on the drive into the park. As we bumped alongside a gravel street, waterfalls spilled down the forested hillsides and throughout our path. “The rain is normal for us. Without it, Patagonia wouldn’t be like this.” He glanced in the direction of the snow-capped peaks and added: “Para nosotros, estos paisajes son vida (‘for us, these landscapes are life’).”

Northern Patagonia is undeniably lovely, but it surely’s not simple to get right here. Cut off from the remainder of Chile by a maze of waterways, steep mountains and the huge Northern Patagonian Ice Field, Aysén remained remoted for hundreds of years. Even right now, regardless of the arrival of the Carretera Austral, the area’s principal freeway, it nonetheless takes round 5 hours to succeed in Queulat National Park from the closest airport in Balmaceda.

“There’s no easy way in,” says information Federico Hernandez, who I meet in a while a ship journey to the San Rafael Glacier, one in every of dozens of glaciers fed by the Northern Patagonian Ice Field. “That’s why this part of Patagonia still feels so wild. Sometimes I look out from the boat deck and there’s just nothing and no one for hours. It’s beautiful.”

At the trailhead, the forest appears able to swallow me entire. Plants attain for my boots, and moss and lichen droop from the timber in thick inexperienced curtains. Water has already begun to seep via my coat. Before I disappear beneath the cover, Juan presents a ultimate piece of recommendation: “Listen to the forest,” he says. “The rain, the birds. That’s how you connect with nature here.” Then, with a smile, he nods in the direction of the timber. “And keep an eye out for the pumas.”

I enter the forest, the place the air is cooler and the odor of damp earth extra intense. Even the rain sounds totally different right here: it not kilos on gravel, however seeps and trickles softly via the cover and ferns. A chucao tapaculo — a robin-like chicken native to those forests — hops via the undergrowth close to my toes, pausing to look at as I squelch via the mud, earlier than letting out a loud, cackling name.

As the path steepens, I take Juan’s recommendation to make use of my ears in addition to my eyes: rain patters on leaves overhead, a red-headed woodpecker faucets someplace excessive within the cover and water rushes past the timber. Eventually, I emerge onto a wood suspension bridge swaying above a thrashing glacial river. It wobbles beneath my toes, the wind whipping at my face and shaking the timber round me. Below, whitewater crashes over large boulders, its roar echoing in my ears.

“‘Queulat’ means ‘sound of waterfalls’ in the language of the Indigenous Chono people,” Juan had informed me. The Chono, one in every of a number of Indigenous teams in Chilean Patagonia, had been seafaring hunter-gatherers who navigated Aysén’s fjords and rivers by canoe for greater than 1,000 years earlier than colonists settled right here within the early 1900s. Today, the Chono are extensively thought-about culturally extinct, their legacy preserved in place names resembling Queulat and shell middens scattered alongside the water’s edge.

At final, there’s a niche within the cover as I attain the path’s viewpoint. I assumed the climate would deny me the park’s most well-known sight, however the clouds have lifted simply sufficient to see it: the Ventisquero Colgante, or Hanging Glacier. A ribbon of ice-blue clings improbably between two slate-grey peaks earlier than plunging over the cliff edge in a collection of waterfalls that crash right into a milky inexperienced lake beneath. Framed by dense rainforest, it appears too lovely to be actual — a glacier hidden inside a jungle.

Into the fjords

Still sodden from the hike, I proceed my journey north alongside the Carretera Austral. Built within the Seventies, the 770-mile street hyperlinks communities that, up till then, relied on horses and boats to get round. On the drive, I move cities the place wooden smoke rises from tin-roofed cabins with hand-painted indicators promoting pancitos (bread rolls). I cease for one, consuming it with home made jam created from calafate berries, that are native to Patagonia. Outside, saddles and stirrups cling from metallic fencing and the air smells of damp leather-based and earth.

I get again into the automobile to proceed the journey and inside minutes the street is swallowed as soon as extra by rainforest, with little signal of human life past the occasional beat-up truck or a gaucho on horseback driving cattle. Then, via a niche within the timber, I catch my first glimpse of the steel-grey waters of Puyuhuapi Fjord: a deep glacial channel the place rainforest-covered mountains meet Pacific waters, and the place I plan to spend the following two nights.

Waiting on the water’s edge is a small white boat, bobbing gently beside a jetty hidden among the many foliage. “The journey won’t be smooth,” says our captain. “But don’t worry, it’s worth it.”

Within minutes, rain is hammering on the home windows and waves are crashing in opposition to the hull. Unable to take a seat on deck, I retreat to the stomach of the boat, the place a handful of passengers hunch silently in waterproofs. I pressure my neck to look via a tiny porthole, however our breath has fogged the glass. Beyond the waves and a Chilean flag whipping wildly within the wind, I could make out nearly nothing.

By the time we attain Puyuhuapi Lodge, the sunshine has nearly gone. Sheltered by dense forest, the whole lot is eerily quiet and the water is as nonetheless as glass. A lone streetlamp glows via the fog on the finish of the jetty and firelight sparkles via a window. When I attain my room, a hummingbird is feeding on a blooming chilco plant lined in electrical pink and purple flowers that cling like pendant earrings.

Wild encounters

“There’s magia [‘magic’] here,” says my information Dani Varga as we set out on a wildlife cruise of Puyuhuapi Fjord the next morning. The solar’s out, however she’s head-to-toe in waterproofs, together with a pair of mud-splattered white wellies.

Overnight, the fog has lifted. Mountains I hadn’t recognized had been there rise immediately from the water, their higher slopes dusted with snow. The fjord has gone from gray to emerald, absorbing the forest that surrounds it. A cormorant skims low throughout the floor, leaving a path in its wake. Then, a darkish form breaks the water just some metres from us. “Dolphins,” says Dani.

A pod of Chilean dolphins — one of many smallest dolphin species on the planet — surfaces briefly with a delicate blow, circles again to examine our boat, then vanishes beneath the glassy water. Soon after, a smooth black snout and two inky eyes blink proper at me, earlier than disappearing once more: a South American sea lion looking for breakfast. “The animals are different here,” says Dani. “They come close. Sometimes birds will land on your hand — it’s like they’re trying to tell you something.”

Ahead, Dani factors out a glacier hanging between the mountains, its ice-blue tongue showing to spill immediately into the fjord. The solely signal of human life is a skinny curl of smoke rising from a wood home perched excessive above the shoreline. A reclusive farmer lives there, Dani tells me. A ramshackle wood boat moored beneath the home is his transport to the mainland, but it surely seems prefer it hasn’t left the jetty in years.

“People say there’s a secret here,” Dani states as we make our method again to the lodge. She moved right here from central Chile a yr in the past, drawn by one thing she nonetheless struggles to elucidate. “But it’s something only people who come can understand. And even when they leave, they still can’t describe it.”

Back on land that afternoon, I sink into one of many lodge’s pure scorching springs. The stone pool sits wedged between fjord and forest, the place large ferns and branches spill over the water. Floating on my again, I watch wisps of steam curl upwards via the timber, leaves and moss hanging so near my face I can really feel cool droplets of moisture on my pores and skin.

As I take into consideration a chilly plunge within the fjord, a ringed kingfisher — one of many largest kingfisher species on the planet — lands proper on the sting of the pool, lower than a metre from me. Standing tall, with a shaggy crest and chestnut-coloured stomach, it fixes me with an unwavering stare. For a second, neither of us strikes. I can hear water trickling via the forest behind me and the distant lap of the fjord beneath. Seconds stretch into what seems like minutes earlier than the chicken cocks its head surprisingly to at least one aspect and disappears between the timber.

In the times that observe, I journey deeper into Patagonia Verde’s fjords and valleys to look at chunks of ice thunder from the face of San Rafael Glacier and raft the Futaleufú, one of many biggest whitewater rivers on the planet. Yet once I assume again to this wild, lovely nook of southern Chile, it’s not simply the roar of falling ice or whitewater that I bear in mind. It’s the mist drifting via the forest cover and rainwater pattering on the enormous nalca leaves. It’s the blow of a dolphin breaking the silence of the fjord and a kingfisher staring again at me from the sting of a jungle scorching spring. Perhaps that’s what my information Dani meant when she spoke of a “secret” in these elements — these uncommon moments whenever you actually really feel linked to the pure world.